No one is debating whether Go is missing a uuid package from its standard library; the debate is about whether this is indicative of a general trend with the Go standard library (as the gp claimed above).

If you’re arguing as the grandparent did that Go regularly omits important packages from its standard library, then it’s not unreasonable to ask you for your idea of an exemplary stdlib.

I think the closest thing to an exemplary stdlin is rust's std. I think it strikes a good balance between being too small or too big. Unfortunately, what rust doesn't really have (yet) is a "blessed" set of libraries to supplement the stdlib.

The problems with a big "batteries included" standard library like go or python strives for, are that you will inevitably leave things out that at least some people consider "basic", like uuid, and parts of stdlib will probably have lower quality than third party libraries, like pythons urllib or gos log package, and it is constrained by needing to maintain backwards compatibility and being tied to the language's release cycle.

I didn’t have a strong opinion on standard library sizes until I tried Rust, but Rust was not a very pleasant experience because there were not standard packages or even consistent community advice for things as pervasive as error handling or async.

But I understand people have different opinions and that there will never be a standard library that appeases everyone. I don’t think “having a batteries included library” aims to appease everyone either. But mostly I just don’t understand the people who criticize Go for not having enough things in their standard library because Go’s standard library is one of the more useful (which may not be everyone’s ideal).

You're answering the question of "which languages have UUIDs in their standard libraries" (Javascript is not one of them). That's not the question I'm asking. If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep? In a Java program, if you were encrypting files or blobs, stdlib or dep?

Is C# the language that gives the Go stdlib a run for its money? I haven't used it much. JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.

I asked the question I did upthread because, while there are a lot of colorable arguments about what Go did wrong, a complete and practical standard library where the standard library's functionality is the idiomatic answer to the problems it addresses is one of the things Go happens to do distinctively well. Which makes dunking on it for this UUID thing kind of odd.

> If you wrote a new Python program today that needed to make HTTP requests, would you rely on the stdlib, or would you pull in a dep?

For a short script, the standard "urllib.request" module [0] works pretty well, and is usually my first choice since it's always installed. For a larger program, I'll usually use a third-party module with more features/async support though, but I'll only do this if I'm using other third-party dependencies anyways.

> JS, Python, and Ruby, I have, quite a bit, and I have the sprawling requirements.txts and Gemfiles to prove it.

I checked the top 10 Go repositories on GitHub [1], and all but 1 of them have 30+ direct dependencies listed in their "go.mod" files (and many more indirect ones). Also, both C and JavaScript are well-known for their terrible standard libraries, yet out of all languages, JavaScript programs tend to use the most dependencies, while C programs tend to use the least. So I don't think that the number of dependencies that an average program in a given language uses says anything about the quality of that language's standard library.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

[1]: https://github.com/trending/go?since=monthly

Just claiming you'd use urllib is a concession. Yeah, I get it: for toy programs, you'd use the stdlib's HTTP.

That's not what happens in Golang.

Fair enough, but the quality/breadth of the standard libraries is fairly topic-specific in Go (and all languages, really). There's a reason that you picked networking and crypto for your examples, since the Go standard library is indeed really strong here—I don't even like Go, but if I had to write a program that did lots of cryptography and networking, then Go would probably be my first choice.

But lots of programs (and most of the programs that I write) don't use any cryptography, and only have trivial networking requirements, and outside those areas, I'd argue that the Python standard library [0] has broader coverage, supports more features, and is better documented than the Go standard library [1].

The Go standard library is still pretty great though, and is well ahead of most other languages; I just personally think that it's a little worse than Python's. But if you mostly write networking/crypto code, I can easily see how you'd have the opposite opinion.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/std

Like, at this point, I feel like we share premises. We disagree, but, fine, seems like a reasonable disagreement. A better one than how annoying it is that Golang lacks "basic stuff" like a standard UUID interface.

Or a GUI framework

> I checked the top 10 Go repositories on GitHub [1], and all but 1 of them have 30+ direct dependencies listed in their "go.mod" files (and many more indirect ones).

Big projects having big dependencies, whoopty fucking do

I gave that example to refute the point that having worked on projects in other languages with tons of third-party dependencies implies that those languages have poor standard libraries. I certainly didn't intend to imply that that means that Go has a poor standard library or that small Go projects often use hundreds of third-party dependencies like JavaScript projects tend to do.

Go's package management is actually one of its strongest points, so I think that it's unsurprising/good that some projects have lots of dependencies. But I still stand by the point that you shouldn't judge a language based on how many dependencies most programs written in it use.

(Except for JavaScript, where I have no problem judging it by the npm craziness :) )

Please don't post sneers and swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for much better than this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ruby has SecureRandom.uuid and others